The NYT goes cash for comment

I was initially disappointed with the NYT’s decision to start charging for content. After some reflection, though, I’ve decided that I’m going to go ahead and subscribe. Here’s why:

In my opinion, the biggest problem with the American media is the decline in good reporting.

This decline is primarily due, I believe, to the poor economics of reporting: it is extremely expensive to send reporters to remote areas of the world and feed and shelter them while they search for stories. Even when they find a story, it’s only rarely that the story will be interesting enough to fill much space for very long, and so the return is often disproportional to the investment.

It is far cheaper to let others discover the “popular” story and just bring in a few talking heads from some think tank to argue about it.

Arguments and opinion are what sells best, anyway. Factual news just doesn’t hold an audience’s interest long enough to build the kind of ratings that advertisers will pay for.

Investigative reporting can produce controversy–which is sometimes good for ratings, but which can also alienate image-wary advertisers.

The American media has become increasingly corporate and the bottom line is what counts.

For all of the above reasons, the American news media is cutting back on reporting. The NYT is a notable exception. (Blogs are great for opinion, but are not yet an adequate replacement for the MSM when it comes to real reporting.)

If we want to preserve the NYT’s ability to report the news, we need to help them stay economically viable.

For all the above reasons, I will go ahead and pay to read the NYT’s editorial pages, even though I agree with John that those pages are not that interesting. I consider my subscription akin to my contributions to NPR and PBS–something of a charitable contribution to help keep a valuable institution afloat.

However, I hope the NYT’s need to make money from their editorial pages will help them improve those pages. Right now, the only columnist I read regularly is Krugman. Herbert has become my second favorite, mostly because of his strong stance against torture and illegal detention. Rich is often very good, but he appears only once a week. The rest are bad: Freedman has become an embarassment, I think. Dowd is okay at times, but lately she seems to be writing about herself as much as the issues. Brooks seems to be stretching for a topic all the time. Tierney hasn’t caught my interest yet. Does Kristol ever write anything anymore? If there are others, I’ve forgotten them, so they aren’t making much of an impact.

The news about special Times content — not just the OP/ED but also Floyd Norris et al — hit me
hard. I have a subscription to the NYT so I
won’t be affected. However, I have my students reading Krugman –and Daniel Altman, Ana Bernasek and…- and I won’t force them to
pay for the privelidge of the Times. I’ve switched them over to Bloomsberg’s commentators where they can read John Berry.

“It is far cheaper to let others discover the “popular” story and just bring in a few talking heads from some think tank to argue about it.”

Nothing new. Henry Luce discovered this, when he invented Time magazine. (A species of “they report, WE decide”, given Luce’s general conservatism.) In its early years, Time consisted of little more than an office that subscribed to a lot of newspapers, staff who clipped stories, editors who decided what news Time would talk about, and writers working with these secondary sources.

Blogging is kind of atomization of this Time-honored (heh, sorry!) editorial strategy. Sure, blogging is more immediate and more focused — you get *daily* Juan Cole, talking about what Juan Cole usually talks about. But Cole ultimately feeds off real journalism plus some think-tank research. And those sources ultimately feed off the efforts of those who make phone calls, appointments, library visits and international flights, only to surrender their “hard news” prose to editors and fact-checkers.

If there’s anyone rejoicing over NYT op-eds going paid, it’s probably Ariana Huffington. If there’s a real loss in going only to blogs, however, it’s the impact that comes with a wordcount budget and tight editing. Yes, Brad Delong is a Virtual Paul Krugman for Free. But you get what you pay for, and what you get with Free Brad is a certain amount of bloviating and occasional rhetorical sloppiness (as when he recently called Gunter Grass a “crypto-Nazi”, which I find very hard to imagine him doing in print.)

Editing and wordcount budgets really are worth something. Krugman once wrote that his little “second career” in op-eds and Salon pieces made him realize that writing a good essay for a general readership was harding than writing an econ paper. I’m sure length limits are part of what made it difficult for him, though I don’t think he specifically mentioned them. I’m grateful that he still considers writing for general audiences (only to be forced to delete quite a few words) worth his time.

Then there’s just … writing well. Not to mention avoiding self-absorption. I agree that Dowd, Kristof and Friedman seem to have let their op-ed styles go to seed. Aside from Krugman, the best op-eds recently in the International Herald Tribune are the non-regulars: people who know their own fields well, who can write clearly, and who have something important to say. Unfortunately, you start into those pieces not knowing what style or attitude you’ll be tangling with, and that can be uncomfortable; you feel like your intellect’s dentures had better be pretty strongly glued to the gums. (I play a little game with myself sometimes: how far can I get into an opinion piece without skipping to the end to discover the writer’s affiliations?)

Being an op-ed regular gives you brand power, a conditioning of reader expectations. That’s something blogging has in spades. But who was it who said “style is the perfection of a point of view”? There’s the danger: as a blogger, freed of the legwork, able to focus on honing style, you can keep readers coming back for the stylistic infotainment even when you’re *perfectly* wrong.

Cass Sunstein says that part of the value of a free press is that it regularly confronts readers with irritants, with risks to their comfortable worldviews. And why shouldn’t it? No point of view is perfect, except perhaps stylistically. If you’re regularly confronting readers with irritants, tight packaging and good quality control really start to matter. If NYTop-ed.com makes money, that’s what they’ll really be selling.

I’m sorry, did you say Brad DeLong is equally good to Paul Krugman. Excuse me while I vomit in disbelief.

I suspect that the cost of litigation, should the NYT attempt to enforce its copyright against those reprinting op-eds (or against the BugMeNot people) will take a big wodge of those $50 subs.

What about Max Sawicky – isn’t he better than DeLong? I think he’s much better.

I would actually pay money (on Sirenic grounds) for a globally installed solution that made it impossible for me to read a column by Thomas Friedman. So the fact that the NYT is providing me with one for free is good news indeed.

I think another decent way for the Times to do pay-to-play, if they could make it work technologically and ensure that hacking the system was too difficult and/or that making the payment was relatively non-onerous and honor-bearing, would be to do a subscription service for outgoing links. I would pay to be able to make linkrot-protected links to any Times article (including the currently cursedly extra-protected food articles) from a domain of my choice.